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Tuesday, October 01, 2013

1000 Species Challenge Homestretch--Day 28 Update

Northern Brown Snake

A big day, starting early driving down to Philadelphia to take my Rosemont College students on their first birding expedition to the John Heinz NWR. We met up with a small group and walked the dike trail out into the refuge, and picked up a lot of new birds for the month including Bald Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, and Marsh Wren. I also picked up four reptiles--including a Northern Brown Snake, and several turtles.

On my way home I stopped off at Todd Marcus Birds Exotic in Delran, NJ and picked up a couple dozen exotic birds, mostly parrots.

The last species of the day reflects the difficulty of identifying many species in the food trade--wild caught Chinese Crawfish. One can only hope these are accurately labeled, though I can only guess that they are native Asian crawfish, which would be from the family Cambaridae. I don't have any other crawfish on my list, so it is a new species for the month even if it is misidentified. But it sure would be nice to have species labels on seafood--and hats off to those companies that I found this month that do label their packaging. Lets hope they are accurately labeled!